Historic Eats: Petaluma’s Colony Club was the place to see and be seen

If the walls at the old Colony Club could talk, they’d tell stories you’d want to hear.

“The history of the Colony Club is loaded with intrigue and bright light personalities,” longtime Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes wrote in 1965. “This club was in operation during the bootlegging era, and the stories about the guys and girls who frequented it during those exciting days would be prize material for a red hot book. In fact, such a book, unabridged, would be hot as fire in this area.”

Built just south of town on Redwood Highway in the 1920s, it was one of the region’s most popular places for drinking and dancing. In the years following prohibition, alcohol sales were closely monitored by the Santa Rosa Liquor Control Office. This lead to the arrest of a Colony Club bartender in 1939, who was charged with serving liquor after 2 a.m. The club’s longtime owner, Tony Mitchell, paid $100 to bail him out of jail (about $1,800 in today’s dollars).

Mitchell was one of several owners of the Colony Club over the years, but the one who was remembered most fondly. He was a longtime talent-booker in San Francisco, with connections to some of the most popular regional acts around. Big bands, brass bands and dance bands were on the docket every weekend. The club’s master of ceremonies, known only as Fegan, operated a regular house band made entirely of local soldiers in the 1940s.

Fegan was one of the biggest personalities to come out of the Colony Club. He famously ended each night by telling customers, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” If you believe Soberanes, it was Fegan who first coined this famed bartender motto.

All that great music attracted some of the area’s best dancers as well. Guests came dressed to impress and ready to show their footwork. One such regular included the famed “Blond Bomber,” a particularly pretty girl who was often mentioned, although never by her real name, in Soberanes’ musings on the night club. She, and many others, were known to put on a show worth watching. In its advertisements, the Colony Club claimed “Petaluma’s finest dancers perform here.”

Regulars remember staying until the wee hours of a Saturday morning, only to come back early the next day to help the owners put the club back together after a night of partying. “(Tony and Marie Mitchell) would serve us a good breakfast; then we would go to work and help them clean the Colony up and get ready for the day’s business,” Tom Holms remembered in a 1970 letter to the editor.

On Dec. 15, 1955, the club burned to the ground. The fire started in the kitchen and spread too quickly to be extinguished by the staff. In the charred remains, Petaluma’s “King of Country and Western” Kay Pickle found an icebox full of still-frozen turkeys.

The club reopened at a new location just north of town in March 1956, but by many accounts, the magic was lost. In 1965, Petaluman Bobby Mezzanatto purchased the site and renamed it ?“Billy-A-Go-Go,” bringing the first topless bar to the area. He was famed for his nightclubs around Santa Rosa, including Handsome Hank, Miramar Lounge and Red Derby. But his plans for the club just outside city limits would be something entirely new.

“This will be Petaluma’s first as far as the A-Go-Go-Girls are concerned. But at present time, the girls in the topless suit will be replaced by the girl in the semi-topless - and even semi-topless should be quite a crowd stopper in this neck of the woods,” Soberanes wrote in 1965.

Billy-A-Go-Go started off popular but fell out of fashion within a few years. Mezzanatto, once known as “Sonoma County’s Night Club King,” later became the “dean of mixology” at the horse races at the Sonoma County Fair.

The Colony Club’s legacy is still celebrated, with matchbooks and coasters popping up on auction sites to this day.